I recently re-read Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 for the first time since junior high. This book is now frequently described as a “period piece,” as a work with some enduring relevance, but a work irretrievably tethered to Cold War-era conceptions of power, government, and culture.

However, re-reading this novel in the age of Trump, Netflix, Amazon, and endless entertainment, it is exceedingly clear that we should still care very deeply about it for several reasons.

First, this book predicts some cultural trends, trends which, the way Bradbury describes them in his imagined future, may seem a bit campy or, indeed, a bit tethered to Cold War-era concerns, but are in fact, growing and advancing toward fruition, as he imagined, just in ways that are exponentially more sophisticated.

Take the entertainment system imagined in the book, for example. Citizens have “TV parlors,” in which the walls are converted fully to television screens. Viewers can participate in sweepstakes to have small speaking parts in different shows from within their TV parlor. Guy Montag, the main character, finds that his wife, Mildred, has sent away box tops for a small part as “the homemaker” in a show. She receives the script and reads along.

Entertainment, in the book, penetrates so deeply into daily life that people literally become one with it. The world of the television show subsumes the world of the glued viewer, who takes the additional step of participating in the program.

We are obviously not at the point of TV parlors, but we are at a point when you can, theoretically, be entertained twenty-four hours each day if you so desire. Bradbury was imagining a world in which TV was so big and ubiquitous and easy to follow that you could surround yourself with it, physically, emotionally, and intellectually. But even in the book, this occurs only in the home, in the parlor. We, on the other hand, are able to take our screens with us, outside of the home. Everywhere. Thus, arguably, the ubiquity of the screen in Bradbury’s world is actually, in comparison, rather limited when juxtaposed to modern American life and its technological possibilities.

Moreover, the dizzying, infinite variety of viewing options on our panoply of screens is simply unprecedented.

For the record, I am not the television police. Not by any stretch. But I do think these trends are worth thinking about.

Also striking and relevant (and a bit alarming) is how the the world in Fahrenheit 451 came to be.

For those who have not read the book, it’s about a fireman named Guy Montag. However, firemen in this society do not put out fires. They are tasked, instead, with starting fires, specifically with burning all books, the possession of which has been made illegal. These firemen answer calls and work 24-hour shifts at the fire station like the firemen in our world. But their job is more cultural and intellectual maintenance than saving lives.

Guy Montag, the book’s protagonist, begins to question the origins and the purpose of his profession. He begins to have independent thoughts, which beget further independent thoughts, which compel him to find answers.

I don’t want to give too much away because I think it’s a book we should all read. But what I do want to talk about is how the society portrayed in the novel came to be, because I think it has present-day reverberations. How did Guy Montag’s society get to a point where books are deemed contraband, where independent thought is actively precluded, and where citizens are content (happy, even) to spend every second of free time in their “TV parlors?”

In his quest for answers, Guy secretly consults a former professor, who explains that three culturally essential things disappeared, were systematically extinguished, or voluntarily surrendered:

1. Quality of information

2. Leisure to digest it

3. The right to carry out actions based on what we learn from the interaction of the first two

First, the professor argues, the criminalization and destruction of books has essentially eliminated quality information. The contents of books, he continues, contain our most valuable cultural information:

“The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

Books contain quality information:

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition, anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail…So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless.”

Without books, without meaningful exploration into the complexities and nuance of real human existence, into “the pores in the face of life,” so to speak, our understanding of ourselves grows increasingly shallow, unconsidered, and devoid of meaning. So we cede ourselves to our entertainment.

Why would we do this? The most obvious explanation is simply comfort and ease. It’s not always pleasurable to look into “the pores” of life, to examine, to explore, to criticize and ask questions. And while perhaps most of you reading this consider this idea pretty basic Humanities 101, keep in mind that lots of people do not feel that way. Lots of people make the very rational decision, consciously or not, that they would rather not see the “pores in the face of life.” You can argue, like Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living, but it’s difficult to argue that the examined life is less painful.

The point is, we can see how quality information could gradually, theoretically, disappear. The scary thing in Fahrenheit 451 is that, as the professor says, “the public itself stopped reading of its own accord.” The state didn’t just decide one day to destroy all books. Rather, the people stopped reading, the state saw its opportunity, and the policy against books seemed, and probably felt, like a natural progression.

The second missing thing, according to the professor, is the leisure to digest quality information. Montag’s response to this assertion is “Oh, but we’ve plenty of off hours.” The professor quickly responds:

“Off hours, yes. But time to think? If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour, at a clip where you can’t think of anything else but the danger, then you’re playing some game or sitting in some room where you can’t argue with the four-wall televisor. Why? The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’”

In other words, free time, leisure time, is spent with entertainment. Mere entertainment. Entertainment that requires very little thinking and no meaningful engagement.

Again, this is obviously not our world. We have some fantastically interesting entertainment. There are outstanding, thought-provoking television shows being made everyday. However, what I think is, indeed, relevant, is our level of engagement with our entertainment. Game of Thrones is thought-provoking, absolutely, but it still doesn’t demand or require thought for you to enjoy it. It doesn’t require that you do any intellectual work. You certainly can, and your viewing experience may be enhanced and enriched if you do, but you don’t have to.

The question to ask, maybe, is this: Do we have so much putatively thought-provoking entertainment because viewers really want to engage on deeper intellectual levels? Or does our putatively thought-provoking entertainment, by giving us the option to think, ingeniously assuage any guilt we may feel for watching thoughtlessly, endlessly?

The final missing thing, the professor says, is the right to act based on what we learn from quality information we have digested. In the novel, since books our outlawed, any action inspired by a book is also illegal.

So back to the original premise of this article. Why should we still care about Fahrenheit 451? Simple. Look at the three things the professor says are missing, which are enumerated above, and ask yourself where we currently are with those three things. Ask yourself what you think entertainment is going to look like when virtual reality takes off. It doesn’t take outrageous, fanciful leaps of imagination to envision a route to something, for all intents and purposes, like the TV parlors in the book.

Examining our current cultural situation, I think there’s an argument to be made that we’re holding on to number one (quality information), albeit tenuously. Quality information exists and is available. The issue is willingness to seek it out and willingness to spend time digesting it and thinking about it, which leads to number two. I would argue we’re voluntarily surrendering number two (leisure time to digest quality information). There is no longer any amount of free or down time that cannot be filled with entertainment. Number three (right to act on digested quality information), I would say, is still intact, but this is also a meaningless right if numbers one and two no longer exist.

So we should care about this book because, to use Neil Gaiman’s terms, it’s premised on the idea, “If this goes on…” It is the type of fiction that “takes an element of life today, something clear and obvious and normally something troubling, and asks what would happen if that thing, that one thing, became all-pervasive, changed the way we thought and behaved.”

When I heard that Tom Petty died, my initial reaction was alarm. Frankly, I was worried about my father, who loved Petty’s music dearly, and for whom, generationally speaking, Petty was a peer. Now I obviously knew that my father was not going to be debilitated, or even heartbroken, by the news. But I also know there’s something uniquely poignant when an artist whose work has accompanied you consistently, whose career arc, temporally, has tracked your own arc of adult life, passes away. It’s a sobering reminder that the end of the road is closer than the beginning.

But then I started thinking about my own relationship with Petty’s music. Some of the first songs I remember hearing in my life are Tom Petty songs. My father would take me to basketball games, playing the Full Moon Fever album constantly. I remember one of the only times I was allowed to use the word “hell,” as a first-grader, was when singing the lyrics, “you can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.”

And for a while, the music primarily just conjured happy memories with my father and the rest of my family, memories of childhood car rides and paternal advice-giving.

Eventually, though, as a result of my own accumulated life experience, Tom Petty’s music became more than just my father’s music. It became my music, too. It’s hard to tell when or why this happened, but I think it began during an undergraduate break-up, when “Don’t Come Around Here No More” became epiphanic. It distilled every thought I had into one line. And I listened to it over and over and over again.

I began to listen to “Time to Move On” any time I made a dramatic change in my life. If I graduated college or graduate school. If I moved away. If I left something behind. It propelled me forward in the directions I knew I needed to go.

It’s hard to put your finger on the brilliance of Tom Petty, but I think it’s about his ability to distill an entire world of emotion into a simple, unadorned line. Almost like a mantra.

People often say that Hemingway packed more meaning into fewer words than almost all other writers.

Tom Petty is cut from the same cloth.

We don’t think of him the way we think of Bob Dylan, as a poetic explorer who blew our minds with virtuosic lyrical performances, nor do we think of him the way we think of Bruce Springsteen, as a sort of rock ’n’ roll John Steinbeck. He was not an avant-garde chameleon like David Bowie, nor was he a limitlessly talented provocateur like Prince. He was not the apotheosis of cool like Lou Reed.

His genius was something different.

Steven Hyden wrote a great article about Petty in 2014 for Grantland, in which he describes the magic of Tom Petty as his “ability to write really simple songs that seem OK the first time you hear them and incredible after the 100th time.” And I think this is pretty spot on.

In that same vein, my best friend and I used to joke that Petty was the most truthful songwriter of all time. Everything he said seemed patently, enduringly true. There was not a hint of dissemblance or falsity or manipulation in any song Petty every wrote. He gave it to you straight. Every time.

“Learning to Fly” is one of my all-time favorite Tom Petty songs. Much like the film, The Great Escape, it’s one of those simple, yet astonishing metaphors for life. The chorus is classic Petty. Simple and straightforward. But so deeply true you feel it in your nerve endings:

“I’m learning to fly,

But I ain’t got wings.

Coming down,

Is the hardest thing.”

The human condition is exactly that. It’s like learning to fly without wings. Learning to find meaning despite impermanence. Coming down, giving up your illusions, embracing this impermanence, is the hardest thing. These are lessons we learn, unlearn, and re-learn throughout our lives.

In the song “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” Petty starts the chorus by singing “let’s get to the point.” And that’s the quintessential thing about Tom Petty. He always got straight to the point. His whole oeuvre is straight to the point, and we listen to him, turn to him, and rely on him when we want someone to get straight to the point, when, heartbroken, we just want to tell a former lover, “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” when we look a difficult situation in the face and say we “Won’t Back Down,” when, knocked on our backs, we want to believe that “Even the Losers” get lucky sometimes, or when we just want to forget about everything else in the world because, hey, “Here Comes My Girl.”

The way in which we use language on an everyday basis, though not the sexiest topic, is worth some serious attention, particularly today, when it seems as though our collective vocabulary is shrinking at a particularly alarming rate.

Why should anybody care about this?

Being imprecise with language is insidious. It’s something people don’t normally spend time thinking about, and yet it has a negative cognitive effect which, on a large scale, causes very real problems that we, as a people, tend to overlook.

What do I mean by being imprecise?

Well, for an easy example, watch Donald Trump speak in any interview.

We transmute thought into language and deliver our thoughts to the world with language. It’s one thing to have an elegantly simple, yet profound thought, which you express in simple terms. In fact, there’s real beauty in this. It is entirely another thing, however, to have a thought you perfunctorily or sloppily articulate in a way that does not accurately convey the thought or, perhaps worse, conveys a different thought, or an array of different thoughts you had no intention of conveying.

This seems like splitting hairs, I know. But this kind of imprecision, collectively, does some real damage.

There are four problems I see with this, three of which are societal and extremely relevant in our current cultural milieu.

1. Flattening of Meaning

Being imprecise with language flattens meaning.

What does this mean?

This means that an imprecision can take an immensely complex situation, or a nuanced, valuable thought, and flatten it into something reductive (potentially dangerously reductive), something oversimplified, or something that is simply no longer an accurate representation.

This also leads to ignorance. When exceptionally convoluted situations are described and couched in imprecise, oversimplified terms, we remain ignorant of very real complexity, complexity which is, in fact, the reality.

For example, describing a foreign policy situation in a particular region of the world as simply “very good” or “very bad” essentially means nothing. There are a variety of different ways to articulate a complicated foreign policy situation which would, with varying degrees of success, convey the challenges, the successes, the failures, the outlook, the strategy, etc. But simply saying it’s very good or very bad robs the listener, the person to whom the words are directed, of meaningful information. Done intentionally, this is downright scary.

2. Shrinking of the Cultural Lexicon

When we’re frequently imprecise and lazy with the words we use, it becomes habit. When it becomes habit we are effectively shrinking the vocabulary with which we can convey what we think. When we limit the way we can convey thoughts in this way we limit our thoughts themselves. And this, carried out collectively, is cultural regression.

A shrinking of the cultural lexicon, of the words we use to convey meaning, results in bigger and bigger hurdles to accessing the real, accurate, precise articulation of complex thoughts and complex situations, which, in turn, create bigger and bigger hurdles to any understanding of these same complex thoughts and situations.

This, in the aggregate, makes us dumber as a country. Which is not good.

3. Less Clarity of Thought

Words are the vehicles we use to convey our thoughts. While speaking imprecisely could, admittedly (on occasion), simply be the result of a lack of time or interest, it can also (more frequently) be the result of an incomplete thought.

Notice when you tend to use imprecise, practically meaningless language. It’s usually when you haven’t thought about something enough to have formulated something more precise, something more meaningful. You speak without precision when your thoughts haven’t been worked on enough to require precision.

Striving to speak precisely forces us to slow our brains down to actually complete thoughts, to chisel and sharpen them, so that an accurate verbalization requires precision.

4. Boring Writing

This is more of an annoyance than a major societal harm, though, again, on a large enough scale this will also have negative cultural effects.

Imprecise writing is boring to read. Simple as that.

Takeaways:

Take the time to formulate your thoughts. Use precise language to accurately convey those thoughts. And try to avoid using “very good” as a descriptor if you can help it.

Proximity to death, or to the specter of death, can (and probably should) be a transformative experience. I recently wrote a piece about surviving a violent, perspective-shaking car crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. What I didn’t fully realize at the time, or even in the days and weeks that followed, was just how deeply it affected my sense of self and my sense of purpose.

Some of the effects were immediate, concrete, and observable right away. For instance, I immediately decided that I need to be more mindful and present in the time I spend with my family. I also immediately knew I needed to start pursuing goals I’d been keeping on the backburner for so long that the backburner itself was beginning to dissolve into empty space.

But the more I reflect on how I feel, where I want to go, and what I want to do, the more I realize that I’ve subconsciously (and now, consciously) been reshaping my priorities, reevaluating my outlook, and realigning my aspirations in much more comprehensive and far-reaching ways than I initially thought, as a result of the accident.

So I’ve started paying more attention, noticing how different my habits have become in just a few months.

What’s become clear is that the mindsets, the obsessions, the priorities, the pet interests, and the fragmentary perspectives that are peeling off and dropping from my personality fall into four primary buckets.

And these buckets represent the four things I’m quitting after my brush with death.

1. Vanity

Nobody quits vanity. I know. This one is impossible. But you can at least bring it within reason, circumscribe it, and reflect on it honestly and critically.

At various points in my life I have been the acolyte, the celebrant, and the actual deity in my own cult of self. This cult of self hit its unprecedented peak on an evening last year when it took me nearly an hour to pick out something sufficiently stylish and edgy to wear to a pretty ho-hum party thrown by people for whom I felt nothing but sincere indifference. And while I haven’t hit this peak again since, the cult of self persists.

I have cared deeply about having very high-quality skincare products, because the daily email I’ve been receiving from GQ tells me very frequently that this is really important. I have spent tons of money on product regimens, on keeping up with fashionable designer menswear, on decorating myself with the accoutrements of status, and just generally performing my conception of coolness every minute of the day.

I cared deeply about persona, and I meticulously cultivated one capable of satisfying and sustaining my relentless vanity.

But now, realizing I very easily (and, honestly, very realistically) could have died in a totally random car accident in the middle of nowhere, it occurs to me that this cult of self I’ve been practicing for quite a while is not much more than a really slick, expensive facade for a self I don’t really completely know yet, a self in a perpetual state of becoming, which I’m now inclined to think is probably the optimal state for a self to be in.

So while I still care what I look like and how I present myself, I’m determined to quit the cultish, material, solipsistic elements of vanity.

2. Excess

I’ve tried to quit excess before. But this time it’s getting pretty serious. I’ve always been the type of person who purchases things for anticipated, but probably over-optimistically anticipated, use. I buy backups for things I haven’t actually even used. I acquire as if life were a staircase, at the top of which was completion, the successful acquisition of all things necessary for happiness.

I’ve always leaned this way, though. I remember, as an undergraduate literature student, reading T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, wishing I was more like the latter, believing deeply in the creative aspect of knowledge as opposed to the strict, acquisitive approach to knowledge espoused by the former.

Since my accident I’ve been slowly, gradually, almost unthinkingly (at first), selling and donating a lot of my stuff. Stuff that I do not use. Stuff that I feel could provide more value to someone else. And stuff I’m not sure how I even got in the first place.

This process began almost as instinct. It has since grown into a thoughtful, intentional shedding of the inessential.

Let this hit you like a brick:

“The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.” –Friedrich Nietzsche

3. Delay

Throughout my twenties, I’ve frequently assured myself that once certain specified tasks were completed, once certain benchmarks were reached, once certain accomplishments were achieved, I would pursue “the stuff I really want to do.”

I’ve mentioned this quote before, but it’s worth repeating:

“You may delay, but time will not.” -Benjamin Franklin

In other words, you may put off doing the things you really want to do, but in the meantime you just might be randomly killed in a completely unpredictable, unpreventable car accident, which will transform what seemed at the time like sensible, cautious delay into uncorrectable, permanent inaction. So, with that in mind, I’m quitting delay.

4. Resignation

Homeostasis is easier than change. In their book, Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise, Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool explain:

“The reason that most people don’t possess these extraordinary physical capabilities isn’t because they don’t have the capacity for them, but rather because they’re satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that is required to get out of it. They live in the world of ‘good enough.’”

Basically, if you want something different, do the work to make changes. Embrace your agency. This is what I intend to do.

I. The Crash

It was supposed to be an exceedingly uneventful day. A day whose highlights would include the McDonald’s lunch I would inevitably (and guiltily) eat and (just as guiltily) enjoy, and the satisfying feeling of completion one feels after finishing an audiobook. Fourteen hours in my car, on the road, driving from the East Coast to St. Louis for my final year of law school, worrying mostly about whether all the coffee I drank in the morning would necessitate a bathroom stop every thirty minutes and prolong the already very long journey.

I was driving west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, through some middle-of-nowhere part of the state, using the cruise-control feature, my thoughts entirely unanchored to any urgent concern or pressing idea. My car was packed full of my belongings, at least those I had brought home with me and taken to New York City, where I spent the summer working at a law firm.

This particular swath of the PA Turnpike was one I knew well. After all, I’d gone to college and then graduate school in the Midwest, after which I taught in Chicago for three years. So every time I trekked home for holidays or vacations I took the same, unglamorous, thoroughly boring route through northern Indiana, northern Ohio, and western Pennsylvania, and then retraced it on my return. I had no reason to believe that this particular trip would be any different.

And so there I was, driving west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. As I was coming around a bend in the road I glanced into my rearview mirror. And then it happened.

A small car came screaming around the bend, lost control, and slammed into the passenger-side rear end of my car. The collision was so severe, so powerful, that it rotated my rear-right tire 180 degrees, to an angle perpendicular to the road, and pushed the tire up into the undercarriage of my vehicle.

The first thing I remember is spinning. My car spun. All of a sudden I was facing oncoming traffic, watching as the cars and trucks drove toward me. At me. Then I hit the median wall separating eastbound and westbound traffic. Due to the warped angle of my brutalized rear tire, there was no chance of regaining control.

Still facing oncoming traffic, my car began to flip over onto its side. I vividly remember this moment, because this was the moment in which I consciously prepared to die. In what was probably two or three seconds of elapsed time I simultaneously steeled myself for excruciating pain, for broken bones, for disfigurement, and resigned myself to the bewilderingly real possibility that this was it. This is how I die. Not in a hospital bed, surrounded by loved ones. Not in my sleep. Not peacefully, painlessly, or quietly. Not even in a house, or an apartment, or a room. But on the turnpike, the highway, in Somerset, Pennsylvania, a life prematurely ended, a still-youthful body unnaturally contorted in a smashed driver’s seat, haloed by shattered glass.

And so my car flipped over onto the driver’s side and slid another ten feet before coming to a stop.

Surely I’m about to be hit, and sent violently from this world, by oncoming traffic, I thought. My eyes were closed, and I kept them closed. I didn’t want to see it happen.

But then I opened them. I was still here. At least, for now. Wait, are my legs broken? Surely something is broken. I mentally tried to communicate with my legs. They responded. So far so good. My head is okay. I think. The driver’s side window, somehow, upon collision with the ground after my car toppled over, did not, in fact, shatter. My skull, consequently, had not been broken.

I unbuckled my seat belt, as my belongings in the passenger seat fell onto me. I tried frantically, instinctively, to open the passenger side door, threw myself at it. This car, as far as I was concerned, was now some kind of pre-death coffin and I had to get out. But I could not.

Soon, people began to approach my car. They ran to me, asking if I was okay, yelling for others. Somebody tried to force open the passenger-side door. It still wouldn’t budge.

But, luckily, my car had a glass sunroof. It became clear that my only means of egress was through this sunroof. So someone struck it with something until it shattered, and I crawled out.

My heart was palpitating. I felt almost drunk. Completely dazed, scanning my body, trying to focus, trying to feel where the injuries were, where the pain was going to emerge, where the bleeding was happening. Picking glass out of my shoes, out of my elbows.

The police arrived. I was told they had been chasing the man driving the car that barreled into mine. He was going 120 miles per hour when he hit me. What’s more, he had managed to climb out of his own damaged vehicle and was now fleeing on foot into the sparsely wooded fields along the road. I was later told that he had broken into a house, where he was eventually apprehended and arrested.

Mile marker 96.7. That’s what I remember looking at when I realized I had survived the crash. That I was not dead or dying. That somehow I was spared.

This is the first time I’ve written about the accident since it happened a month ago. For some reason I never thought to write it down, even though I still think about it almost daily. My neck still feels tight when I turn to look to my left. My ribs are still sore when I sneeze. I have some foreign sensations in my lower back. But these symptoms will pass.

One thing I think about often is the plate of brownies my mother wrapped in aluminum foil and gave to me that morning to eat on the road. She baked them the night before. And after the crash, when I was trying to gather my possessions from my completely totaled car, there were brownies plastered to everything. Smashed chocolate brownies. On the windshield, on my books, on the seats, on my bags, on my shirt. Everywhere. These chocolate brownies I would never eat, the manifestations of deep motherly love, were now everywhere. And I couldn’t remember if I’d even thanked her for making them.

II. Resolutions

Since the crash, I’ve thought a lot about randomness, about transience, about luck, and about life. In some ways I suppose you could say it was a bit of a wake-up call, a reminder of just how easily you can be plucked from your existence, of all the different ways there are to die. Which obviously, naturally leads one to think hypothetically. Would I have been satisfied with the life I’d lived, had I died that day on the Pennsylvania Turnpike? Would I have wished for more? What would I regret?

Dwelling on these things a bit, I made a few promises to myself, promises I want to share, though they are, admittedly, cliché, sentimental, and stuff we probably all innately know. But sometimes these are the types of things it’s easiest to forget, and it shouldn’t take a car crash to bring them back into the foreground.

Promise #1: I will be more present in the moments I spend with loved ones. Sub-promise: As someone with an occasionally (I admit it) irrepressible allergy to platitudes and sentimentality, I will, nevertheless, make the extra mental effort to quiet this part of my brain and embrace, consciously and deliberately, even if only to myself, the warming miracle of familial love. I know, I know, we all know this is a healthy, good thing to do. But knowing and doing are two different things. I “knew” that being mindful during time with your family was the healthy thing to do before my car was completely destroyed on the Pennsylvania turnpike, and yet, when I emerged from my toppled vehicle, alive, walking, and breathing, my thoughts immediately drifted to whether or not I thanked my mother for making brownies just for me, her twenty-eight year-old son.

Promise #2: From here on out, I will live a life that is utterly, unabashedly mine. Outrageously, singularly, exuberantly mine. This means, for starters, pursuing the things that get me up in the morning, the things that get me all riled up and inspired. I will internalize, deeply and profoundly, the fact that we have a finite amount of time on this planet. And that time decreases with each passing day. As Ben Franklin said, “You may delay, but time will not.” So no delays.

Promise #3: I will write more, write constantly, persistently, for everyone and no one. I spent the majority of my life wanting to write, but stopped, for no reason, during a particularly naïve and angsty undergraduate crisis of literary faith. Hereafter, however, I will fear no intellectual paralysis, no mental blockages, no dry wells of creativity, no embarrassments. Hereafter I will share my thoughts, I will write myself to clarity or sweet, meaningful confusion. And then I’ll do it again.

These promises don’t fulfill themselves, and they can’t be fulfilled overnight. And we all have different promises we make to ourselves. But I think the important thing is to do exactly that. Make promises to yourself. Work at those promises. Make them part of who you are. And each day try to be more intentional than the last.

III. Closing Thoughts

The most misread and misunderstood poem in the history of poetry is probably Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Most people think it means we should take the proverbial road less travelled, which symbolizes being ourselves, individuality, nonconformity, etc.

But this is simply inorrect. The poet says on three different occasions in a five-stanza poem that the roads are practically identical:

“Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black…”

The narrator is not intentionally choosing to take a path that is obviously less travelled. He is choosing between two paths that are equally worn.

The poem is about ascribing meaning to experience retrospectively.

As for me, and how this relates to my car crash, there are many ways for me to interpret or ascribe meaning to it. I could fixate on the randomness of death, perhaps throw myself down a nihilistic rabbit hole, and come to a Jean-Paul Sartre conclusion, that “every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” And this may or may not be true. Its truth or falsity is not the point. I could alternatively choose to ascribe no meaning whatsoever to the experience, which, in a sense, is not intellectually far off from the Sartre point of view.

Or, I can choose to interpret my car accident as a clarifying event. An event casting my lived experience theretofore in high relief against my purported aspirations and ideals. A stirring, rousing near-death experience. After all, if my car had been struck on the left side instead of the right side, my gas tank would have been destroyed, and who knows what would’ve happened. Or my passenger side window could have shattered onto my face. My airbags could have malfunctioned. Is there a reason I was spared? Is there a reason anyone is spared? There are no answers to these questions. There is only the meaning you ascribe to your experience, and how that meaning informs your life.

When I’m an old man, like the old man in “The Road Not Taken,” I will look back at that Monday in late August and think, I almost died, could’ve died, but I didn’t. And that experience woke me up to some things I should never have forgotten, before the forgetting became irreversible, before the forgetting was total.

I will look back and say I survived for a reason, or rather, I choose to believe that I survived for a reason, and that, as the poem goes “has made all the difference.”

The self-improvement and productivity-enhancement markets are wildly saturated today. Thoroughly, totally saturated. The ubiquity of blogging, social media, and YouTube has democratized this field to such a profound extent that anyone, quite literally, can begin blogging about self-improvement and stake a claim on expertise.

A large part of this is simply the nature of the internet. But another significant part of this phenomenon is that self-improvement is kind of a mushy concept, by which I mean it’s not really a field in the same way that, say, economics is a field, nor is it a discipline like, say, behavioral economics is a discipline, nor is it a hard skill like, for example, coding is a hard skill. And perhaps because of its nebulous contours and fluctuating rigor, the self-improvement world lacks rudimentary credibility requirements. Which is why there are no credibility barriers to access the market.

Does this matter? Is this really a problem?

Well, maybe. It depends. I know some people who frequent these types of spaces feel and voice frustration with work that occasionally feels like thinly-veiled repetition, or the paraphrased opinions of others, or artfully arranged platitudes, or seemingly copied-and-pasted (and artfully arranged) blurbs about life hacks.

But the frustrated reader/consumer/follower also plays a role in creating the very thing that frustrates him or her. This is because most self-improvement work is simply responding to supply and demand, and, while most self-improvement writing aspires to the clout of something beyond mere commodity, much of it, unfortunately, is simply that.

Let me be clear that this analysis doesn’t hold true for the truly original self-improvement writers and thinkers, who are profoundly original, pioneering, and inspiring. My critique is of the crank turners (a term I will return to shortly) who follow them in the hopes of profiting from the demand that these originators have created. More on this later.

Anyway, in my eyes (and I’m saying this as someone who is, admittedly, not an innocent party here), the self-improvement world has (at least) three major problems, which may or may not affect its legitimacy, depending on how much these things bother or don’t bother you. I’m going to refer to these three problems as The Credibility Problem, The Originality Problem, and The Competence Problem. There tends to be some overlap, but I’m going to address them each in turn.

I want to say at the outset, however, that I do think there’s a lot of really valuable self-improvement and productivity-enhancement work out there, some of which has certainly had positive effects on me, personally, and how I pursue my own goals, and I have no intention of disparaging anyone or minimizing value that people have gotten from their self-improvement fare of choice.

But, since this is Medium, where we share ideas to challenge each other and try, generally, to push the human enterprise forward on all fronts, I offer this critique as a call for us to ask for more from our self-improvement and productivity-enhancement writers, as a call for us to sharpen our focus, to resist empty affirmations, and to push each other (in constructive, well-argued ways, of course) to go deeper, to think originally, to read and write not for numbers, but for the transformative power of one truly good idea expressed well.

I. The Credibility Problem

As mentioned above, the self-improvement world has no credibility barriers to access the market. This is because there are no actual credibility requirements, self-imposed, audience-imposed, or otherwise, for writing about self-improvement. Now, one can argue that this is a good thing, taken altogether, and that there should not, in fact, be any credibility requirements of any kind. Which is fine. There’s also the fact that when people start talking about credibility, some listeners inevitably start smelling what they perceive to be elitism. The two are not one and the same, but they are, with disturbing frequency, misunderstood as such.

One could argue alternatively that we should just let the audience decide. If a bunch of people like it, it must be good. This is after all how we treat popular music, network television, etc. Like a commodity. Supply and demand. Which, again, is fine.

Except that, without any barriers to access or credibility requirements, everyone with a computer can publish their self-improvement work. With the consequently flooded market and no real way of distinguishing experts from amateurs, consumers rely on barometers with little or no relation to quality, like numbers or views, claps, hits, etc. This, in turn, incentivizes the self-improvement writer to accumulate as many of these numbers as possible (I just recently got an email from a self-improvement writer defining his success exclusively in terms of how many followers he has amassed). These distorted incentives lead the aspiring self-improvement writer to figure out what people are consuming in this space (supply and demand) and to provide more of the same (there is no incentive for originality). Increased numbers mean increased expertise, at least in the eyes of consumers, which keeps the cycle going. Which is why you see articles written explicitly about how to get more people to read your Medium posts. Because these people understand supply and demand. They know that they don’t need actual expertise. Because actual expertise isn’t predictably or consistently rewarded with numbers. Expertise is your numbers.

So how are numbers accumulated in this space? The strategies I’ve seen employed frequently fall into two categories, and both are savvy ways of meeting supply and demand. The aspiring self-improvement writer looking to amass followers quickly and on an exponential scale tends either to feign expertise or to borrow expertise.

Feigning expertise is essentially the fake-it-till-you-make-it strategy. This is when someone boldly promulgates the things you must do to be highly successful, the proven ways to become a rich entrepreneur, the things holding you back from achieving massive success, etc. with the confidence and self-assuredness of someone who has, himself or herself, achieved some of this high-flying massive success they write so authoritatively about. These are the people who aim to boost their numbers by just very assertively stating lots of pretty intuitive, pretty basic truths that we all innately more or less understand, with lots of quotes and one-liners thrown in for style and urgency.

Borrowed expertise is when everybody runs around seeing who can most effectively pass off someone else’s thoughts as their own. Borrowed expertise is the really pure supply-and-demand way to get your numbers up. Basically you just see what self-improvement writers people are into and just quote them, plagiarize them, summarize them, or paraphrase them so that you can essentially partake in their market and their readers.

Is this bad? Well, maybe. It leads to a problematic circularity, when it comes to credibility, which I think is harmful for both the self-improvement genre and its readers. People want numbers because numbers, in the current state of things in the self-improvement world, equal credibility. To get numbers, you fake or borrow expertise you don’t have. Then once you get numbers, those numbers become your real expertise. I don’t think this is sustainable, if people are going to take self-improvement writing seriously. It also reveals the essential irony in the whole thing, as it currently stands, which is this:

A very real problem with a lot of self-improvement writing is that a troubling percentage of people writing about self-improvement haven’t actually done much besides write about self-improvement.

This credibility problem also directly leads to the next problem.

II. The Originality Problem (AKA the Echo Chamber)

Here’s another thorny problem with lots of self-improvement writing. Much of it is so overwhelmingly, almost vertiginously unoriginal. In other words, it’s an echo chamber. I’ve written a little bit about this before in the context of lists of habits and routines of highly successful people here. But the point is a lot of people are saying the exact same thing. What’s worse is that a lot of the overlap isn’t even itself original. It’s borrowed from elsewhere, too. So basically we’re getting watered down, second- and third-hand self-improvement advice.

A typical trajectory of a particularly thoughtful nugget of self-improvement wisdom is something like as follows. Somebody wildly successful in their field (like Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, or Seth Godin) or one of the giants in self-improvement (like Tony Robbins or Tim Ferriss) will say something pithy and smart and probably actionable. Self-improvement writer A will take this pithy, smart nugget of wisdom and do some negligible work on it. Massage the language a bit, perhaps. Or maybe simplify it somewhat. Or, better yet, turn it into a command or an imperative. And then self-improvement writer A will send his piece of essentially paraphrased third-party advice out to the masses. If the masses seem to be viewing the article in sufficient numbers, the trajectory will continue. Self-improvement writer B will then read this article, see that other people like it, and try to get in on the market by essentially paraphrasing self-improvement writer A, who is paraphrasing some highly successful person.

In other words, the people with the real credibility, with the actual expertise, become the source material for the droves of self-improvement writers behind them trying to borrow some of their expertise. Everybody is riding everybody else’s credibility coattails, and it makes the space highly unoriginal. One self-improvement insight is like shouting “hello!” in a canyon. The message reverberates back to you in decreasing volume and clarity until it disappears.

And in most contemporary self-improvement pieces I read on the internet the echoes are multi-voiced. These pieces can be disentangled and unpacked into their essential borrowed elements. E.g. this idea is lifted straight from Seth Godin, this one from Ryan Holiday, this sentence is almost verbatim Tony Robbins, while this one is you quoting self-improvement writer A, who was paraphrasing Elon Musk to support something he or she borrowed from Bill Gates. And around and around we go.

I’m guilty of it, too. It doesn’t make me feel amazing, but I also want to be honest. Who among us hasn’t read an article that’s clearly a series of quotes, paraphrases, plagiarisms, or ever-so-slightly reworded ideas, seen the number of claps and thought, this can’t be that hard, right? Maybe I should just be quoting Ryan Holiday more frequently? And then, before we know it, we’re perpetuating the same incestuous supply and demand game from which we probably set out to differentiate ourselves. I have dabbled in this weird self-improvement sampling game before, myself. And doing so doesn’t mean you don’t believe what you’re saying or writing. It’s not even necessarily a bad thing. If you’re borrowing something that someone like Charlie Munger said, people are going to find value in it because people find value in what Charlie Munger says. It’s not a bad thing, inherently. It’s just unoriginal.

Now, I also don’t mean to suggest that there are no truly original thinkers and writers in the self-improvement space. They do exist. There are the pioneers. The real experts. The real visionaries. But then there are what David Foster Wallace calls the “crank turners.” He talks about crank turners with respect to literary fiction, but I think the analysis can be just as accurately applied to what we see now in the self-improvement space:

“But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets…come out the other end…You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious shit-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets.”

III. The Competence Problem

This one is very simple, and consists of just two points.

First, if you write an article about being exceptional, or the pursuit of being exceptional, and it’s littered with grammatical errors, punctuated erratically, and just generally written carelessly, I’m not going to take you seriously, because I’m going to question how much time and thought you put into it. You can call me a snob if you want. I know you’re probably thinking it. But you should feel the same way. Because we should have high standards here on the wonderful Medium. If I’m going to take the time to read your article, I want it to be something that you spent time thinking about, something you wrestled with, something you’re proud of, and something with a personal touch to it.

The second point is just basically a smell test. There are lots of writers out there in the self-improvement space blogging with borrowed expertise about how highly successful people became highly successful, suggesting, obviously, that if I want to be highly successful I should keep reading their blog. The smell test goes as follows. The lives and career paths of lots of people blogging about how highly successful people became highly successful are radically different than those of the said successful people, which begs the question: why would I listen to people who are in no way like the people I aspire to emulate tell me how to emulate those people, when I can just read about those people myself?

Think about it this way. You don’t want self-improvement advice from just any random person. This is where the competence problem overlaps with the credibility problem, because often the way self-improvement writers separate themselves from “just any random person” is by the amount of views or hits they have. And the quickest way to rack up views and hits is to give the people what you know they already want. In other words, borrow someone else’s expertise and sell it. And around and around we go, again.

The best self-improvement writers, for the most part, are those who don’t only right about self-improvement, those who, through the pursuit and achievement of mastery in their respective fields, have acquired unique, first-hand knowledge and insight into how to go about improving yourself, persevering through plateaus, etc.

These people are particularly compelling and effective because their expertise isn’t the feigned or borrowed supply-and-demand expertise that is common currency in the self-improvement world. They bring their real, actual expertise in their respective fields to bear on ideas of self-improvement.

These are people like Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who researches and writes about aging, cancer, and nutrition. People like Seth Godin, who have decades of experience in marketing, business, and technology. And there are obviously many more.

V. Takeaways

1. The heart of self-improvement is in the first word: “self.” True, meaningful self-improvement is a highly personal experience. My self-improvement is going to look different than yours. We’re different people with different goals, different insecurities, different strengths and weaknesses. Given the deeply personal reality of self-improvement, it seems unwise to rely on writers and thinkers engaged merely in the highly impersonal enterprise of peddling the thoughts of others.

2. As I mentioned in the beginning, Medium is a place where we critically engage with important ideas. So let’s be rigorous with our standards. Let’s push each other to develop our ideas and explore new ones.

3. There is nothing inherently wrong with numbers and with racking them up. Or, for that matter, with claps. But clap with intention. Clap exuberantly if your brain was exercised. If your perspectives were expanded, challenged, or enriched. Clap for writing that makes you think damn, I never thought about it that way before. Because it’s on us to curate the content we want to see and to build in the right incentives for writers and thinkers.

4. Self-improvement, ideally, should be anchored to a mission. Your mission.

While it’s no secret that highly successful people tend to read extensively and voraciously, we often focus on the more obviously business-related or performance-related works on their bookshelves and treat literary fiction almost as an afterthought.

Long confined to liberal arts campuses, criticized (sometimes vehemently) for its alleged uselessness in the real world of commerce and business, of gainful employment and upward mobility, the reading of literary fiction, we now know, has scientifically backed benefits that are just as valuable (if not more) to the business community, as they are to diligent English majors in libraries across America.

In a much talked about study in 2008, professors Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley asserted that “carefully crafted literary stories” are “simulations of selves in the social world” that “function to abstract social information so that it can be better understood, generalized to other circumstances, and acted upon.” They argue that “engaging in the simulative experiences of fiction literature can facilitate the understanding of others who are different from ourselves and can augment our capacity for empathy and social inference.”

Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro, authors of the 2017 book, Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities, explain this phenomenon in simpler terms. To know people, Morson and Schapiro say, “read their stories.”

So reading literary fiction helps us understand people. But why should we care? How useful is this, really?

“Reading a great novel,” Morson and Schapiro continue, “you identify with its characters and spend countless hours feeling from within what it is like to be someone else. You experience the world as someone of a different social class, gender, religion, sexuality, moral understanding or countless other factors that differentiate human experience. And if you are going to bet on how markets will act, you sure better have an appreciation for what drives the actors. In other words, you better be able to put yourself in their place.”

This is not the usual argument we hear about literature’s usefulness, but new research is revealing benefits of reading literary fiction that were previously either dismissed or unknown. We’re used to hearing beleaguered humanities students extolling the cultural and societal value of literature, but literature is now being recognized by the business world and the start-up world as something that doesn’t merely enrich us intellectually, but as something that can also help us develop intangible skills for successfully running businesses, investing in the stock market, managing teams of employees, and creating better products.

Chief among these intangible skills is emotional intelligence. In another study, conducted in 2013 by social psychologists at the New School for Social Research in New York City, researchers gave participants different types of writing to read. Some participants were given literary fiction, some were given fiction bestsellers, some were given well-written nonfiction, and others were given nothing. Participants were then given a series of tests that measured a person’s ability to understand emotions, predict expectations, or understand beliefs in specific scenarios. More succinctly, the tests were designed to measure empathy, social perception, and emotional intelligence.

The researchers found that the readers of literary fiction, and not merely popular fiction, performed better on all of the administered tests, results which were attributed to literary fiction’s capacity to encourage “readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.” Literary fiction, the researchers argued, increased emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand how others think and feel, has far-reaching effects on business. Understanding the thoughts and feelings of one’s employees makes for smarter, more effective leadership and a more cohesive, collaborative team environment. Understanding the thoughts and feelings of customers makes for more meaningful marketing, more responsive service, and a deeper understanding of what people like or dislike about your product and why. Understanding the thoughts and feelings of others makes for better preparation and performance in negotiations. And, perhaps most importantly, understanding the thoughts and feelings of others makes for richer, more fulfilling personal relationships, which lead to increased happiness and productivity.

With so many benefits, we might wonder why reading literary fiction isn’t frequently found on lists of daily habits and routines we should be following the way, say, exercise and meditation are. I posit two reasons for this discrepancy.

First, the positive effects of reading literary fiction aren’t tangible or immediately measurable. It does not instantly produce noticeable improvement the way exercise triggers all kinds of positive chemical reactions in our brains. Reading literary fiction increases our understanding of other people, which, though incredibly important, is a bit less noticeable than a runner’s high, or the way we feel after meditating for twenty minutes.

Second, we’ve been sort of culturally conditioned to view reading literary fiction as a waste of time. Shane Parrish acknowledges this in his Farnam Street Blog: “We all have a feeling that literature is important. And yet many of us avoid the category altogether, feeling it’s a waste of time to pick up literature when we can learn so much from non-fiction.” But, as Parrish points out, this is simply an inaccurate view of it. “Literature,” he continues, “isn’t a waste of time at all. In fact, literature saves us time.”

And this is because literature vastly expands our emotional understanding of a wide and endlessly varied array of human experience, which, in turn, enhances our ability to relate to and empathize with others.

Make reading literature a part of your daily routine. The benefits may not be of the immediately measurable sort, but they are profound, long-lasting, and valuable for us all.

Quote of the Day

“But if these years have taught me anything it is this: You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.” -Junot Diaz

What I’m Reading

Peak: Secrets From the New Science of Expertise by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool